<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Arial, Veranda">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by markie:<BR><B>the rickenbacker he gave to Noel was by accident. Noel was taking too long to tune his guitar so Jonny lent him a gibson. Noel liked it so much that jony didnt have the heart to ask for it back.<P>Jonny also bought the 12 sring rickenbacker that belonged to the byrds guitarist. Now that is a cool guitar.<P></B><HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>So for Markie and any other guitar buffs here's the lowdown:<P>For recording Marr gravitates towards a few time-tested favourites. 'Over the last two years, I've been experimenting with everything I've got and I've come back to the same old guitars - not because of nostalgia, simply 'cos they're fantastic.<BR>'My Gretsch 6120 is great, even people who own other ones say mine is the best they've ever played. I got it from Pete Townshend - and it's one that Noel isn't going to get. Another main recording guitar is my '59 Les Paul - just as you'd expect, an amazing guitar. I used that a lot on Strangeways... and The The's Dusk album. My other Les Paul is a mid-'80s one with a Bigsby retro-fitted; that's the one I used on How Soon Is Now?.<BR>Although Marr used a red Gibson ES335 throughout his time with The Smiths, his Gibson ES345 (left) is a more current favourite. 'I used it a lot on The The's Dusk, like the riff from Dogs Of Lust,' he notes. 'I've also been playing my black 355 a lot recently with Electronic' - the 355 can be seen in the videos for Forbidden City and For You. 'That's a really interesting guitar. It's got a very clean, almost David Crosby-type sound - hey, another really unfashionable influence! - and it doesn't fizz too much. I like using it for slide. Clean, but spooky - that's the vibe with that one.'<BR>These days Marr's Rickenbackers rarely see the light of day, but for the record he has two: a black '82 330 6-string (seen in the video for This Charming Man) and a mid-60s sunburst 360-12, his main Smiths recording Rickie, bought off Pete Townshend.<BR>Marr's main Strats are both '63s. 'One I keep constantly high strung in Nashville tuning, which is the top two strings the same and bottom four like a 12-string set with the low strings taken off,' he explains. 'It's a good tuning for coming up with new stuff 'cos you kind of feel like you're playing backwards. I used that on loads of Smiths stuff - You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby, Half A Person...<BR>'I've got two main Martin acoustics, a D28 and a D45. The D28 was always disappointing for recording until I started to put it in different tunings. That's often the case with guitars - they often don't happen in concert tuning - so I'd always recommend changing things around to see if they sound better.<BR>'Another guitar I really like is a Fender Bass VI baritone guitar, which is interesting, even though it's only really got one sound. I used that on Helpline Operator by The The.'<BR>By far the weirdest thing in Marr's collection, however, is his nine pickup Fender Strat. 'I got it really cheap,' he excuses himself, feebly. 'Not only are there nine pickups, but there's an on/off and in/out-of-phase switch for each pickup. I'm not making this up, 'cos Noel was witness to that dreadful event. Bizarre! But I just thought, if Kraftwerk played guitar, they'd play this! I used it on the rhythm outro of Electronic's Out Of My League (from Raise The Pressure). I figured it would give some really strange harmonics... and if you just replace the word 'strange' with 'shit', then I was right."<BR>For amps, Marr again relies on a few old favourites. 'In particular, there's my Fender Deluxe - very punchy and hot, but not too distorted. You can hear the natural sound of that really well on Feel Every Beat by Electronic. I also used a Fender Pro a lot - that was also on a lot of the early Smiths records, while my Blackface Twin was used from the Queen Is Dead onwards. you can hear the Pro really well on New Order's Regret - Bernard (Sumner) borrowed my Les Paul and Pro for that, so he owes me some money as well.<P>
